A New Feature to Handle Unresponsive Clients and Open Contracts

[bigc]

I've been on Upwork for more than a few years now, and the one big drawback for me personally is having clients not respond after work has been completed, leaving me with the choice of closing out a contract and risk a blank space in between contracts with good ratings, or keeping the contract open and reaching out periodically to see if someone will respond. I have quite a few inactive contracts left open simply because some clients choose not to respond, even though they seemed quite satisfied with the work/released the funds/payed the hours/etc. Some clients will just ghost, regardless. I totally understand that the rating system has been adjusted to not effect your rating when closing out non-feedback projects, but empty projects with no scores are still ugly and not reflective of any meaningful information for new clients accept that you've completed a project. The best way I've found to deal with this is to just politely request that clients close the contracts themselves and leave a review for me, and leave the contract open until they get back with me. The problem is that some of these clients just leave you hanging.

If there is one feature I could highly suggest, it would be this. Offer a feature that allows you to close out any and all contracts without it showing up on your Profile/JSS and Work History IF the contract has been open and unresponsive for over 6 mo/year/etc. This could be offered for 90% and above people, people with over a year on the system, or anyone with a contract open longer than 6 mo/year with no response. Also, this would be completely voluntary, allowing freelancers to still feature the project in their Work History if they choose to just close out the contract with no feedback.

I can't see how this would negatively impact anyone by offering this feature, and would only allow freelancers to exercise more control over their profile in a more than reasonable manner. Helpful comments welcome 🙂

[LuiggiR]

Hi Corey,

Your feedback is greatly appreciated. I'll go ahead and share this with the team.

[bigc]

Thanks Luiggi!

[ljms]

This is too much of a sensible, common-sense solution to ever be implemented. Upwork only introduces changes that put freelancers at a disadvantage.

[feed_my_eyes]

We already have the ability to close contracts ourselves, and it doesn't affect your JSS unless the client reappears and leaves negative feedback. There's no disadvantage in having some of your projects end without feedback.

[bigc]

Hi Chrisine. Thanks for providing some input 🙂 The overall point would be allowing a freelancer to remove a project with no feedback from their work history. Regardless of any disadvantages, I personally think a project with no feedback looks ugly on my profile page. Again, just a personal preference. Ultimately, it would only be a feature that a freelancer could potentially take advantage of they so choose. The only real disadvantage to this would be showing less projects in your work history. For a freelancers like myself with upwards of 400-500 completed projects, It wouldn't bother me to show a few less. In this, I'm also considering the potential client experience. Putting myself in the shoes of a client, I would be much more apt to hire a freelancer with a full page of reviews with those pretty green stars! Having a page of work history with big gaps would make me feel like something is missing in comparison to a freelancer that has a full string of reviews and feedback. I can only assume that this would increase a freelancer's potential of getting hired and ultimately making everyone more profitable in the end.

[bigc]

lol, at least I can say that I tried 😄

[martina_plaschka]

No thanks. I can't see the advantage of hiding jobs, not counting in earnings, not demonstrating to clients which prior work I did. Makes absolutely no sense to me. 

[bigc]

Thanks for your input, Martina! Although it wouldn't be valuable to many freelancers interested in showing every project they've worked on, I imagine I'm not the only one who would trade a few examples of projects for a clean page of projects from clients who took the time to give a valuable review. I honestly wouldn't see this as beneficial to a freelancer with less that 50 to 100 jobs. And again, just an available feature for a freelancer interested in taking advantage of it. Personally, I would toss out every one of my projects without a review. But that's just me 🙂